Marc Palmer

I went to a small club to see Cephalic Carnage play. It’s been a while since I went to a real "grindcore" gig (I use the term loosely), and I really enjoyed it. The energy and musicianship in bands like Cephalic cannot be denied, whether you like the noise they make or not.

I’ve not spent much time in the past trying to work out why I have such eclectic music tastes. I love a few grind bands, a few metal bands, some hardcore, some classical, some contemporary, some progressive rock – but I seem to be very selective. Nu-metal or whatever they call the stop-start "let’s just make a grinding chugging tuneless riff" bands that are so prevalent these days in the metal scene are fine – but they don’t appeal to me. For 30 seconds I might think "ooh I like the sound of this" – but it is exactly that. The sound "feels" good. Interest is not sustained because the songwriting is not "out there" enough.

This is why I really like bands like Strapping Young Lad, Mastodon, Cephalic Carnage, Dillinger Escape Plan. Tons of energy, musicianship and … tunes. Remember those elusive things? That’s exactly why I just can’t sustain interest in the Meshuggah tracks that I’ve heard to date. I love their rhythmic complexity and the heavy sound, but I get so bored because there’s never a decent melody (that I’ve found) to occupy the melodic part of your brain. DEP for example have plenty of bluster and noise, but absolutely killer songwriting within. Heaviness and complexity with great melodic hooks is what separates the men from the boys, in my tastes at least. Pretty much anyone can sit down and write an aggressive and heavy-sounding song with a few chugging chromatic riffs.

Personally I do struggle with the sound at these "grind" gigs. Maybe its just my ears, but I am inevitably a bit disappointed as the mid-range of the guitars is typically lost out to bass rumble and the drum assault. On record its a lot better, but seeing a bunch of guys play such insane music while leaping around and generally having a great time is always invigorating.

OK so we had some feedback on the new logo and we’ve listened and had some more minor tweaks done. It’s richer, higher contrast, and we have variants with or without the texture in the background.

The media is here but note that due to a bug in the Confluence used at Codehaus that it is showing some old thumbnails still, if you click on the images for larger versions you get the true new graphic.

Thanks again to David Moss of www.lurexlounge.com for his patience and skills!

Argh. I hate sys admin. Its not my forté but I can get by and learn as I go, so I get lumbered with all the administration and security config of the servers for our clients.

We desperately want a freelance sys admin who can do bits of work here and there for us on an hourly rate, and respond to issue tickets from our hosting providers and keep us informed and the boxes for mid-range (typicaly single server) websites secured.

If you’re great with security, have a good teleworking ethic, and think you could fit in with a bunch of misfits PLEASE GET IN TOUCH AND SAVE ME FROM THIS ADMIN HELL!

Please send introductory mail and qualifications/references to marc at enotions dot co dot uk.

Say hello to the new look Grails logo:

Thanks very much to David Moss who donated his time to produce the new logo and icons for us. Please check out the work of his company at www.lurexlounge.com – they do web sites, logos, 3D animations etc.

There’s a fun spoof of the Apple mac ads I’m Java, I’m Rails. It’s quite well done, and the Rails guys are entirely right to do this.

There’s just one little problem. Every part of that "ad" can have Grails substituted for Rails, and you interface natively with all those "problematic" jars if you want to, to leverage all the great Java APIs natively.

Grails = Rails++ for people in Java environments!